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There are new rigorous obstacles in front of Spain's students with scholarships, but for one journalist that seems reasonable, because female students have been squandering their awards to get boob jobs anyway.

Journalist Paloma Cervilla published an entry on her blog “Pido la Palabra” (“May I Have the word?”) [es] on June 25, 2013, titled “Becas para Ponerse Tetas” (Scholarships for Boob Jobs)[es], which has made sparks fly among social networkers, who have expressed their indignation in blogs, comments, and countless tweets.

Spain's new system for awarding scholarships, much more restrictive than in previous years due to sharp cuts in funding, is currently being revisited. Minister of Education José Ignacio Wert‘s original proposal required, among other things, that students maintain a grade point average of 6.5 out of 10 [roughly the equivalent of a C average in the U.S] and passing grades for all subjects (85% for technical degree programs). This has placed 30,000 students at risk of expulsion for non-payment [es].

At the time of this writing, Cervilla's article has been withdrawn and cannot be read on its original site, but several other websites have picked up the text. One of them, eldiario.es, published the deleted content [es] in its section called La Crispación [“Controversy”]. Here is the paragraph that has web users so incensed:

[…] I remembered something a friend of mine once told me. As a college professor, she was exasperated by the bad management and poor controls exercised over the scholarship money allotted to students. She told me she knew students who had used their scholarships to pay for breast enlargement operations -all right, let's just say it – boobs jobs. […] These are just a few cases, but there are probably a hundred thousand others just like them.

Screenshot of Paloma Cervilla's blog page after the controversial article was removed. Text reads: “We apologize, the page you requested could not be found or no longer exists.”

In record time, the internet was flooded with protests, like this one from Carlos Villar Menéndez, in his blog Luces de Bohemia [es] (“Bohemian Lights”):

People who spread these types of rumors are trying to turn urban legends into reality; they believe that “anecdotes” equal “statistics,” and they confuse “a friend told me so” with a completely reliable source. But the real problem isn't that they propagate such unsubstantiated lies; unfortunately, that has become rather commonplace. The big mistake here is that fraudulent cases -both the imaginary and the real ones- are being used as an argument for dismantling the welfare state.

@Barbijaputa [es]: I don't know why anyone would insist on bailing out a country like ours, full of ETA lovers who drink away their farm subsidies, waste their unemployment checks on plasma TVs, and spend their scholarships on boob jobs.

Yes, there are scholarships offered to some families who don't need them; yes, there are scholarships that are improperly spent; and yes, there are scholarship recipients who never finish their studies, but these are an insignificant minority compared to the thousands of young people who, thanks to a scholarship, have built a future for themselves, and whose work will have a positive effect on our society, if they don't have to move overseas to find employment.